Note: Before reading the following arguments, please understand that they are not what I believe. On Wednesdays, I deliberately argue for wrong ideas, challenging my listeners to call and defend the obvious right answer, which is usually far harder than one would expect. This is a summary of what Wacky Andrew will be arguing, not a representation of what real Andrew believes.~Look at the Supreme Court, these four justices tend to always see things this way and those four justices tend to always see things that way, and they all claim to love the law and the Constitution equally. Are they lying or are they human?
~Only a person completely inexperienced with the law would believe something as naïve as that judges even can be impartial
~Do you want humans or do you want machines?
~The law itself is often too impossibly complex to even know what it definitively says.
~The law is a process you have to go through in order to find out the result. Many times, it can’t be known ahead of time or outside the actual running of the process.
~Justices and law professors and attorneys all will admit amongst themselves that judicial impartiality is the exception rather than the rule, but this doesn’t mean that the law is broken or that the law isn’t fair. It simply means that people have completely unreasonable and naïve expectations about what law ever could be.
~Zero tolerance policies are the illegitimate offspring of too much interest in achieving a completely dehumanized and robotic legal process.
~People only perceive judicial partiality when the results are not what they desire. People almost never accuse verdicts they like of being the result of “judicial activism.”
~The law must be somewhat ambiguous or else we wouldn’t even have judges in the first place. ~Think about the simple admission that we need expert judges in order to have trials and appellate courts and what this means for the premise that the law is clear, simple, and obvious.
~Judicial impartiality is a lot like Plato’s Noble Lie. A useful myth that helps the lower classes to believe the system is more fair and stable than it may in fact be.
~We don’t believe that journalists can be unbiased, nor teachers, nor ministers, nor even Olympic judges. Why is it that we suddenly believe in the existence of some super-human category of person who can transcend his own humanity once he puts on a silky black robe and ascends a wooden pulpit?
Links:
Thomas, Sotomayor, and the Noble Lie (Findlaw)
Sotomayor and the myth of JI (Everyday Ethics)
Why do judges wear black? (Fascinating pictures)
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